Prior art vehicle anti-theft systems concentrate on providing good tracking methods once the vehicle has been declared as stolen. Their methods necessitate the following steps: declaration by the owner that the vehicle is stolen, activation of the tracking system by the anti-theft system provider; emission of a signal from the stolen vehicle, tracking of the vehicle by the anti-theft system provider, communication with the police to request support and authority to seize the vehicle, arrival of the police on the location of the stolen vehicle and seizing of vehicle. An example of such a tracking system is U.S. Pat. No. 4,818,998 to Apsell and Stapelfeld and assigned to Lo-Jack Corporation for a Method of and System and Apparatus for locating and/or tracking stolen or missing vehicles and the like.
Other prior art systems are aimed at locating objects or people by using the same principle: the lost of the object or person must be communicated to the system for a transceiver on the object or person to start emitting a signal and therefore allowing tracking of the transceiver. An example of such a locating system is found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,021,794 to Lawrence which discloses a personal emergency locator system.
A classic example of a stolen vehicle scenario is as follows: a person goes shopping at a shopping center and parks his vehicle in the parking lot. He enters the shopping mall and stays in the mall for about two hours. When he exits the mall to go back to his vehicle, he realizes that it is gone. After having alerted the mall security, he contacts his anti-theft service provider and gives the pertinent information allowing a search for the vehicle to be conducted. A tracking vehicle is dispatched to the locating of the stolen vehicle. Almost two and a half hours have elapsed since the moment of the theft. The thief, if a professional thief, has had time to drive the car through the city, into a van headed for a freight boat or across a border and has even had time to disassemble portions of the vehicle, including the tracking system transceiver, which is left somewhere along the road. If the tracking vehicle reaches the location of the transceiver, they will usually solely find the transceiver. Most of the time, they will not be able to dispatch the tracking vehicle to the location of the transceiver because it will be emitting from a different jurisdiction or from the sea. The owner will therefore have paid for the installation of the system and the annual membership fee plus service charges for the actual tracking of the vehicle without being able to retrieve the vehicle. If the vehicle is located, the service provider then contacts the police to obtain the authority of seizing the vehicle. If the vehicle is moving, the tracking vehicle must engage into a pursuit of the stolen vehicle until the police can take over the chase and seize the vehicle. This is hazardous for both the service provider and the police.
The main problems with these prior art systems are therefore that the transceiver can be easily removed from the stolen or lost object, that by the time the location of the object can be tracked down, the object has been transported in unreachable locations, that arresting the thief involves dangerous car pursuits. This is caused by the delay in reporting the stealing of the object by the owner and by the fact that police intervention is delayed.
Driving a car is a privilege subject to laws made by the State, such as the possession of a driver's license. The motorist is licensed under the State that is represented by the police. So the vehicle belongs to the licensee that has a delegate authority. In absence of the motorist, the vehicle belongs to the authority that may stop it. This is why a police officer can stop and seize a vehicle if it is properly identified as stolen.